Ask HN: Show us you mostly vibe coded side project
Did you have a side project idea that you took from 0-~100% using only (or majority) vibe coding?
Any projects built this way making money?
Show us what you've built and what tools you've used to build it. How was the development experience? What tips and tricks do you have? What would you do differently if you were starting over again?
An open Ask HN community consultation from 2025 where @hersko convened hundreds of developers and bootstrappers to share real experiences, hard numbers, and tactics.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Participants share raw revenue figures, churn rates, and stack decisions that corporate PR never publishes.
Recurring answers reveal that distribution, not coding skill, is almost universally the rate-limiting step in developer businesses.
Practical recommendations on bookkeeping, payment gateways (Stripe vs Paddle), and freelance-to-product transitions.
Community Debate Themes:
Hundreds of active indie hackers contributed case studies, pricing heuristics, and pitfalls to avoid when moonlighting on side projects.
CATEGORY Ask HN Roundtables →
HISTORICAL ERA Post-ZIRP & AI (2023–2026)
COMMUNITY SCORE 5 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 1 comments
Recipeweave.com
Had an idea to make cooking multiple recipes at the same time easier by merging the steps together in a way that made sense.
For example, while letting x from recipe a soak for 10 min (it will automatically give you a timer), do y from recipe b.
It gives you the full step by step walkthrough of the entire meal preparation and also includes helpful features like:
- recipe import and storage - cooking timers automatically added when needed - easily email the full ingredients list to yourself
The core functionality is complete and works well but I'm still polishing and adding features.
I built it using cursor with o3. I started by planning the libraries and architecture for the project and broke it down as much as possible when feeding it to the agents. I found it was also very useful helping with the deployment process setting up the Lightsail env, nginx, cloudflare etc...